Review: Kingston 256GB V100 SSD: your machine, on speed

Solid state drives offer a new lease of life for ageing machines - and will put more than a spring into the step of any system. Laptop owners in particular will like Kingston's offering which work with any OS

Kingston's SSD V100 256GB solid state drive comes with parts so that it can replace hard drives in laptops or desktops. Photograph: Kingston Technology

Listen. Just stop, and listen. How much noise is your computer making? Can you hear it? Are the fans going? Is the hard drive making its constant little noise?

Not the one I'm using. It's silent. That's because it's got a solid state drive (SSD), which roughly doubles its read/write speed and improves the performance of the laptop I'm using it in by about 50%.

That's quite an improvement - equivalent to upgrading your machine completely. The drive in question is a Kingston SSDNow 100 256GB (model number KINGSTON SVP100S2256G), which I'm using in a three-year-old MacBook laptop running Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 with 4GB of RAM (the maximum it can take).

Hard numbers

You can see precisely how much the SSD gooses the performance: using the Xbench benchmarking suite, the Macbook scored 193.67. Comparing that to the average for Macbooks - which is 101.96 - you can see that something's changed.

If you look at this comparison of two similar-specced Macbooks, one with and one without an SSD, the difference is pretty dramatic when it comes to the disk work - and that affects everything else. Basically, adding an SSD is like making your machine a year to 18 months younger.

Hard sell

SSDs are, in essence, high-speed Flash memory - but very large amounts of it. The challenges of booting and running your machine off what is in effect a giant SD card are obvious enough: every address in memory is immediately accessible, because there's no need to wait for data to be located on the rotating drive, pulled off it, and pushed through to the motherboard. The only limits on an SSD drive's speed are its read/write speed (reading is usually much faster than writing) and the data throughput available on your computer - which will be mercilessly exposed by an SSD. (I've certainly noticed it on this ageing laptop.)

All in favour

The arguments in favour of SSDs are plentiful. Compared to rotating hard drives they are:• quieter (silent, actually, because they have no moving parts)• much, much faster• shockproof (because, again, they don't have any moving parts)• immune to magnetic effects (in case you often wave big magnets around your laptop)• smaller, potentially (though SSD drive manufacturers are building them to the same configurations as rotating drives, to make installation simpler)• more energy-efficient (again, no moving parts, so no need to keep the drive spinning)

All against

Those are very considerable upsides. The downsides? Compared to rotating drives, SSDs are:• expensive - about five times (laptop) to ten times (desktop) more for a given amount of storage, though the price is roughly halving every year and the differential is shrinking• either require OS support for best use, or careful choice of the disk so that it will work with non-supporting OSs• potentially limited in life due to write/rewrite (in which the cells deteriorate over time; it takes thousands of rewrites but is a known problem. Equally, all hard drives will die eventually; which is why you keep backups, of course)• the technology is still improving, so in a couple of years SSDs will be even faster and have even longer lives.

What's it like to use?

In a word: heavenly. You'll notice it most when you boot your machine, when RAM usage is at its smallest and the machine is basically talking between ROM and, now, the SSD. What used to be a slow procession turns into a sprint: a startup that would take a minute takes about 10 seconds with an SSD. (If you boot your machine regularly that will turn into quite a saving.)

Similarly, when logging into your user account, programs that used to take forever to get going will snap to attention and race to start.

Everything happens faster, because - you realise - so much of what a modern operating system does is disk-bound: we're using browsers that cache more and more data (such as Google Maps and other Ajax-y things), we're trying to do more at the same time, and we want to switch between applications seamlessly.

All that data has to be cached and paged back and forth from RAM to the disk as you move around; having an SSD means you're far less aware of the paging process. I'm a very heavy browser user (I'll regularly have four or five pages open, each with 20 or more tabs open). Life with a standard drive quickly became painful: switching between tabs or pages or programs always involved waiting for the data - which sometimes seemed to be coming via container ship from somewhere across the world.

By contrast, fitting an SSD is like giving your old computer a mad dose of amphetamines, but with none of the iilegality or medical problems. It feels as though you've got an entirely new machine - but at only half the cost (in general) of that new machine.

Overall, you'll spend more money getting an SSD than a standard rotating drive. But you'll save stupendous amounts of time.

Who benefits?

Laptop users, who for years have lived with rotating drives that spin at 4200 or 5400 rpm (rotations per minute), will see a far bigger immediate difference than desktop users (where 7200rpm drives are more common); there's also the fact that if you drop your machine, there's no risk of the drive heads crashing and destroying your data. Laptops also tend to have less storage than desktops, so it's cheaper to upgrade them: personally I think that 256GB is the sweet spot for laptop and arguably desktop storage: it's enough for the OS plus plenty of room for films and music. If you really need to add lots more storage, then add-ons are cheap, with 1TB of USB 2.0-speed storage costing around £50 (and falling; in a year's time that will buy 2TB).

Desktop users can benefit too from SSDs: Microsoft's programmers, for instance, have begun replacing their rotating drives with them because of the faster boot up and other speed benefits. Again, you will definitely notice the difference.

Keeping in TRIM: why it's important

In OS support, a key element needed by most SSDs is called "TRIM", in which the OS tells the drive firmware which blocks it doesn't need anymore and can be wiped. Windows 7 does include TRIM; previous versions of Windows do not. Existing versions of Mac OS X don't include TRIM, though versions shipped with MacBook Airs built with SSDs do. The upcoming version of OSX, 10.7 (aka Lion) does, though.

This doesn't mean that you can't use SSDs with older versions of Windows or Mac OS X; just that you have to be careful to make sure that the disk you buy has firmware that will perform the TRIM function that the OS won't.

That's because normal OS operation involves a lot of writing, reading and then overwriting. It doesn't matter to a magnetic drive whether a bit is set or not; "deletion" is done in the disk index, not at the actual data point (the index entry pointing to the data is wiped, but the data remains on the drive).

But if you overwrite an already-written SSD bit, that shortens the cell's life; it's better to write new data to a cell that hasn't been used, or which has had less use. That needs to be handled by the OS (via TRIM), or the drive firmware.

The Kingston SSD that I've been using, for instance, has firmware functions to carry out the TRIM work that OS X doesn't, meaning that the lifespan of the drive isn't affected. The V100+ drives do the function known generically as "garbage collection". The key is that it makes your drive live longer. (If you want to read more about TRIM/garbage collection, Anandtech has more technical detail than you can shake a well-specced stick at.)

How to do it

Bear in mind that replacing your computer's hard drive requires you first to back it up to external storage. But backups are good, and having somewhere separate with a backup of your data mans you're obeying Schofield's Second Law, which is always good. Different machines make it more or less easy to replace the hard drive (the newest MacBooks involve a fair amount of screwdriver-based jiggery-pokery), but Kingston, for example, provides fittings so that you can replace a laptop or desktop SATA hard drive, including the connectors you'd need. Alternatively, you may want to hire a local expert. Make absolutely sure that you have a working backup (ie that you can boot from the backup). If you're running Windows and/or Office, make sure too that you know where all your licence numbers are - your SSD will look to a Windows system like a new installation.

In fact, unless you're doing a like-for-like size replacement, you may want to leave some things off your SSD drive that you previously had on your hard drive. In which case you might want to consider whether you really need those Restore points and that hidden recovery partition on your drive.

Once you're running

With your system restored to life, and on the SSD, you can do some things that will save you and it lots of space and time, because using an SSD (unless you do a like-for-like size replacement) means being careful about what you have on your drive.

Things you won't need:• Defrag (definiteiy; it will mess up your drive because it will overwork the cells. Leave it to TRIM or the firmware)• hibernation (on Windows)• various other elements, which are well set out in this blog post about using SSDs on Windows (which builds on a series by Ed Bott at ZDNet on using an SSD on Windows: part one, part two, part three).

Mac users should turn off the "spin hard drive down" setting in the Energy Saver preferences, since you won't need it (no moving parts, remember?). You can, if you want, turn off the "sudden motion sensor" that will try to stop disk activity if it detects that the machine is falling, since that doesn't matter now, but it's not an important tweak.

Finally, some people may try to tell you that it's far better to spend the money instead on a REALLY BIG rotating hard drive because that will give you loads of cache availability and you'll never run out of space. Ignore them. You can hive off all those big files to fast offline (or slow cloud) storage, and the speed benefits of an SSD have to be experienced to be believed.

Only one warning, though: once you've tried it, you'll never be able to go back.

Kingston V100 SSD drives: The verdict

Pros:Extremely fast; quiet; lower power demand; no risk from being dropped; unaffected by magnets; contains firmware that does TRIM function if not provided by OS

Cons:Expensive (about £350 for a 256GB drive, compared to around £60 for the same size of rotating drive for a laptop); lifetime depends on usage.

Verdict: has to be 5 stars, despite the price, because anything that lets you completely revive your machine for less than half its cost is definitely worth the money.